miércoles, 16 de abril de 2014

Maxthon, the New Browser on Linux Land

A while ago, a piece of news that stirred interest on the Linux community was the porting of Maxthon to Linux.

Maxthon is a browser. I knew of its existence a while ago, when I learned that one of the kind readers of this blog used it to display one of my entries.

I visited Maxthon's main page, but was disappointed because the browser was (if a recall correctly) based on Internet Explorer and, as I had anticipated, did not support Linux.

So, I lost all interest on this browser altogether.

But then came the news that Maxthon now supports Linux. Again, interest sparked and I visited the page again expecting only .deb packages for Ubuntu.

However, I was pleased to see that they also offered .rpm packages. I accepted their EULA (Maxthon is NOT free software) and installed the .rpm to both my Mageia 3 desktop
and laptop.

The installation was simple and straight-forward. I was almost ready to find out what a "cloud browser" is.

When I fired up Maxthon, a Chromium-reminiscent browser took the screen. Yes, Maxthon looked extremely similar to Chromium. In fact, it identifies itself as Chromium, not Maxthon, which is a problem because you cannot use certain services on the main page: it says that you must have Maxthon to be able to use them (?!)

The browser claimed to be fast. I did not see that speed until I registered a Maxthon passport account. Once you do that, the browser rewards your activity, your completion of personal information, loading up of a picture, etc.

Maxthon for Linux running on Mageia 3 64 bits

To be honest, the idea of the the benefits of a cloud browser still eludes me. Yet, I am glad to have another option for browsing the web.

3. Top 1 Rescue Distro:SimplyMepis! When something goes truly wrong, you can always count on this Linux distribution to rescue the system, get into the Web, modify files and make back ups. All that without mentioning it is almost easier to use than Windows ;-)